OK, since there's no sticking with the topic after MAGAT "logic" is applied, I'll give you an example of corporate greed:
To hear older generations tell it, everything was better in the past. Gas cost a few cents a gallon; children respected their elders; toilet paper came with 650 sheets to a roll, and the only thing you had to worry about was the constant existential threat of nuclear apocalypse looming over your head.
Now, chances are at least one of those things was news to you, and we’re betting it’s not the gas or the nuclear war. So, to answer your question: yeah, toilet paper used to come in 650-sheet packages. If that’s not hitting you as remarkable, though, here’s the context: today, a regular roll of Charmin sold in the US has just 56 sheets per roll.
Thanks to Mark Dent over at The Hustle, we actually have quite a detailed picture of the decades-long toilet paper shrinkflation process. In the 1970s, he writes, “Charmin’s regular roll had 650 sheets of single ply toilet paper […] By 1975, the roll shrunk to 500 and then to 400 in 1979.”
But “Charmin was far from done,” he continues. “By 1986, the sheet count had dropped to 380. On eBay, I found nearly identical 1988 Charmin packages – one contained 300 single ply sheets per roll and the other had 280.”
Not only are toilet paper manufacturers offering fewer sheets per roll, he points out, but those sheets are also smaller than they used to be. A Charmin regular roll in 1966 used to be made up of square sheets of side length 4.5 inches (11.43 centimeters), he reports – measure one yourself today, and you’ll find it a paltry 3.92-by-4 inch rectangle (9.96 by 10.16 centimeters).
Even adjusted for inflation, that results in a price increase of 700 percent per square foot since the 1960s.
And, lest you think we’re picking on Charmin in particular, other manufacturers have been just as sneaky. You might think a brand like Scott 1000 would be immune from this kind of shrinkflation – after all, its very name is a promise that each roll comes with that many sheets. And yet long-term analysis by Edgar Dworsky, founder of ConsumerWorld.org, has found that even they have shrunk, with the weight of a standard four-pack going from 32.2 ounces (913 grams) in the past to 23.6 ounces (669 grams) today.
[edited from IFL Science]